notanotherbookreview

Photo Essay. I love photography that begins where words  leave off.  This work is visual poetry, evoking feelings and sight  below the surface of consciousnes,  while showing what we think we know  in one moment of time. Begin this walk. This is an excerpt of a longer series to be savored some night. S.W. On a Darkened Night, SoHo 2018 GHOST WALTZ, Volume 1: "Acquainted With the Night" by Diana A. Rivera New York City's architecture is full of layers of history. Rabid development continues to destroy historical buildings at an unprecedented rate. My current urban photography series Ghost Waltz was born from searching for New York City's past eras before they vanish. This series explores different neighborhoods and their singular a t mospheres; Downtown’s gritty patrician buildings; Midtown’s unearthly heights; U p town’s broad swathes of recognizable yet hidden historical elegance. With influences such as Brassai ̈ , silent films and spir...

THE SHADOW BOX by Michael Cristofer is a Pulitzer-winning play and justifiably so, since it takes on content as difficult as any life lived. This play's focus is on people preparing for the moment when death, abstraction and certainty, will arrive.  Not with the medieval figure in a black cloak carrying a sycthe but in a mythical enclave in California's poconos in the 1970s. In Regeneration Theatre's wonderful restaging, the scene's a mythic "summer camp" with cabins indicated by roofs of wooden triangles and walls with Birchwood branches (set Samantha Cancellarich) . Random furniture fleshes out interiors, though it's dwarfed by the heavenly feel of the invisible Poconos (Lighting Domino Mannheim) . Hikers exclaim about the clean air and difficulty finding the place, as they catch their breath in the clearing. Spirits are high, they might be on holiday but for the travelers they seek, who have already arrived. These loved ones have been told this ...

https://www.kindstory.org/ I have a story on this site, Caroline Leavitt has one featured that's very good. Site is a small way to counter all the reportage focussed on the reverse of kindness. Adds an experience people might not think about a lot, the exchange of small or large kindness. What does it mean? Anyway here's mine. Leavitt's worth reading on site. SW A guy sits in a folding chair that's chained to a traffic sign, reading. His gloved hands hold a shallow cardboard box containing a book. His hooded face leans down, totally concentrated; a private act on this popular downtown corner. His battered sign says he's in the beginning stages of a debilitating disease. Yet he has good color. His clothes look okay, his eyes sparkle behind thick glasses when he talks about books. A couple feet from his chair is a food wagon. Construction workers, arrayed on the sidewalk, wait for coffee, Danish, egg sandwich on a bagel.  I break the line with my water p...

SHERATON in 2250. Not much works, but meeting is scheduled. PARADISE NOW?? Paradise Gardens Addendum Paradise Gardens is a political dystopia, begun in the 1980s finished in a final New Edition in 2017 (Pelekinesis). I was working a clerical job on a Wall Street paper, when I had visions of downtown NYC in 2250 and the purged new world of 3001. The story opens at the desk of Janet McCarthy, claims adjustor at Rudimental Life Company, part of the United Business Estates (U.B.E.) Left behind are the Unconnected, people outside corporate protection. Capitalism has devolved into the corporate feudalism of the U.B.E., where employees are conceived as Superior or Average to fit the needs of business. In 2250, after the Federal government has dissolved amid ecological breakdown, a real estate visionary, with a PR maven, sell corporate business on “Eden underground,” Paradise Gardens. Though I wrote the book, because I couldn’t get the characters and scenes out of my mind (even dreamed sequenc...

How 3 wealthy American patriots financed a 16 million dollar loan for the War of 1812 , initiating investment banking. Then came a whistleblower... "Parish, Girard and Astor jointly pledged to take more than ten million, but not at the 6% Gallatin (U.S. Treasury) had offered. Rather, they agreed to pay in 88.00 a share and in return to receive an annuity that would yield them 13 years of annual payments that would eventually total the full one hundred dollars per share. The pledged amounts were more than the trio's current combined private fortunes, a considerable risk. Nonetheless, they put up 10 million dollars' worth of the certificates apiece, and resold the rest. The big purchasers were insurers in Philadelphia, and banks and brokers in new York, and merchants in Baltimore, who all resold the certificates in smaller batches to hundreds, perhaps thousands of individuals. A list of the occupations of some of the individuals to whom Girard's bank sold the b...